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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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I am no better at predicting the future than
anyone else is, and I generally try to avoid doing so. If I could predict the
future, then my retirement account would be doing a lot better than it is. What
I can try to do is what historians do, which is to predict the present. History
is about connecting the dots such that present conditions can be understood as
a predictable outcome of past events. It is about trying to extract a logic
from the higgledy-piggledy of data that randomly survive, trying to recreate
the back-story of who we are now.

My view about the future is that it is good to think of it as
in our hands. If the future were not in our hands, there wouldn’t be much
purpose in having these discussions. We have them because we hope to shape the
future, as opposed to having the future shape us. And in starting from the
belief that the future is in our hands, it is helpful to know how the
conditions in which we find ourselves came to be.

Most human beings, of course, take current conditions to be
natural. They tend to think that the way things are is either the way they have
always been or the way they are supposed to be. For some people, “current
conditions” mean the conditions that obtained when they were in high school.
But it is the same idea: people tend to have some conception of the way things
ought to be that is based on some experience of the way things either are right
now or were once in their own lives.

Academics, of course, are trained to see the way things are
as contingent. Most of us can appreciate this fact in the abstract. What is
harder for us sometimes is seeing why things are the way they
contingently are. And this is especially true for the conditions of our own
professional life, our role as people who work in universities. This may sound
odd, to say that academics find it especially difficult to grasp the contingent
character of present professional arrangements. But this is true of any
professional and any profession, and the reason is that professionals are
socialized into those arrangements. That is the essence of professional
training. We internalize the norms that inform our practices. We really
couldn’t do our jobs if we did not.

This is what often makes it difficult for us to countenance
challenges to those norms. It is part of the tuna fish salad syndrome—the realization
you first have in childhood that not everyone’s mother makes tuna fish salad
the way your mother makes it. This can be a very unsettling experience, even
vertiginous, the first time it happens. Sensitive children have been known to
throw up on discovering, for example, bits of celery in their best friend’s
mother’s tuna fish salad. It is a look into the abyss. We professors are made
of tougher stuff, of course. But it is helpful to see that the system in which
we work is the way it is for certain reasons, since that helps us to decide
whether those reasons are still relevant.

The modern system of higher education in the United States emerged in the fifty years between the Civil War and the First World War. You
could even say that the system was invented in those years, so completely did
it supplant what had been there before. One thing that strikes you looking back
at that period was the role played by a small group of individuals—university
presidents. They were Titans in their world. They had power, and they used it.
Some built institutions from nothing: Daniel Gilman at Johns Hopkins, William
Rainey Harper at Chicago, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, G. Stanley Hall at Clark. Others completely transformed existing institutions: Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, Timothy Dwight at Yale, James Angell at the University of Michigan. Twenty-first
century university presidents, who have so little control over the academic
missions of their institutions, must look back at those men and weep bitter
tears of frustration. Of these Titans, the first, the longest-serving, and, for
our purposes, the most important was Charles William Eliot, of Harvard.

Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869. His academic field
was chemistry, but he was not a particularly accomplished chemist. In fact, he
had resigned from the Harvard faculty in 1863 after being passed over for a new
chair in chemistry. When the Harvard Overseers chose him, he was working at
what many at the time would have regarded as a vocational school, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Overseers were taking a radical
step. Eliot’s appointment constituted recognition that American higher
education was changing, and that Harvard was in danger of losing its prestige.
Harvard picked Eliot because it wanted to be reformed. Eliot did not
disappoint. He was inaugurated in the fall of 1869, and he served for forty
years.

By the time he retired, Eliot had become identified with
almost everything that distinguishes the modern research university from the
antebellum college: the abandonment of the role of in loco parentis, the
abolition of required coursework, the introduction of the elective system for
undergraduates, the establishment of graduate schools with doctoral programs in
the arts and sciences, and the emergence of pure and applied research as
principal components of the university’s mission. Eliot played a prominent part
in all these developments. He was, after all, a prominent figure at a prominent
school.

But he was not their originator. Other colleges instituted
many of these reforms well before Harvard did. Yale had been awarding
doctorates since 1861, for example, and the trend toward applied research was
kicked off by the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, passed by the wartime
Congress in 1862. The reform that Eliot was most closely associated with was
the elective system: by 1899 he had gotten rid of all required courses for
Harvard undergraduates except first-year English and a foreign language
requirement. Cornell and Brown, however, had tried free elective curricula well
before Eliot. (Until his appointment, Eliot had actually been somewhat dubious
of electives; he seems to have changed his mind, partly because of his own
reflections on the advantages of an elective system, but possibly because a
committee of the Harvard Overseers had drawn up a report recommending more of
them before he was hired.)

So Eliot’s role was to some extent reactive. He was a quick
student of trends and an aggressive implementer of change. He adopted a
“there’s a new sheriff in town” attitude toward his faculty (an attitude that
has not always proved effective among presidents at Harvard). But he did bring
one original and revolutionary idea with him when he came into office. This was
to make the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for admission to professional
school. It may seem a minor reform, but it was possibly the key element in the
transformation of American higher education in the decades after the Civil War.

Before Eliot, students could choose between college and
professional school—law, medicine, and science, which in the nineteenth century
was taught in a school separate from the college (as at MIT, for example).
Harvard had its own science school, called the Lawrence Scientific School. In 1869, Eliot’s first year as president, half of the students at Harvard Law School and nearly three-quarters of the students at Harvard Medical School had not attended
college and did not hold undergraduate degrees.

These were, comparatively, respectable numbers. Only nineteen
of the 411 medical students at the University of Michigan, and none of the 387
law students there, had prior degrees of any kind. There were no admissions
requirements at Harvard Law School, beyond evidence of “good character” and the
ability to pay the hundred dollars tuition, which went into the pockets of the
law professors. There were no grades or exams, and students often left before
the end of the two-year curriculum to go to work. They received their degrees
on schedule anyway. Standards at medical schools were only a little less
amorphous. To get an MD at Harvard, students were obliged to take a
ninety-minute oral examination, during which nine students rotated among nine
professors, all sitting in one large room, spending ten minutes with each. When
the ninety minutes were up, a bell was sounded, and the professors, without
consulting one another, marked pass or fail for their fields on a chalkboard.
Any student who passed five of the nine fields became a doctor.

Eliot considered the situation scandalous. He published an
article about it in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869, just a few months
before being offered the presidency, and that article was almost certainly a
factor in the decision to appoint him. Harvard wanted a reformer because there
was alarming evidence in the 1860s that college enrollments were in decline,
and the existence of an easy professional school option was one of the reasons.
Once installed, Eliot immediately set about instituting admission and
graduation requirements at Harvard’s schools of medicine, law, divinity, and
science, and forcing those schools to develop meaningful curricula. It took
some time: a bachelor’s degree was not required for admission to the Harvard Medical School until 1900.

Eliot had two goals in mind: one was to raise the value of
the professional degree, but the other was to save the college from going out
of business. His reform had several long-term effects on American education and
American society. To begin with, it professionalized the professions. It erected
a hurdle on what had been a fairly smooth path, compelling future doctors and
lawyers to commit to four years of liberal education before entering what are,
essentially, professional certification programs. This made the professions
more selective and thereby raised the social status of law, medicine, and
science and engineering. Law students were no longer teenagers looking for a
shortcut to a comfortable career; they were college graduates, required to
demonstrate that they had acquired specific kinds of knowledge. People who
could not clear the hurdles could not advance to practice. Eliot’s reform
helped put universities in the exclusive business of credentialing
professionals.

The emergence of pure research as part of the university’s
mission—the notion that professors should be paid to produce work that might
have no practical application—was a development that Eliot had relatively
little enthusiasm for. He believed in the importance of undergraduate
teaching—as a champion of electives, he always insisted that the subject was
less important than the teacher—and he believed in the social value of
professional schools. But he was too utilitarian to believe in research whose
worth could not be measured in the marketplace, and Harvard did not formally establish
a graduate school in arts and sciences until 1890, which was rather late in the
history of graduate education. The push toward doctoral-level education came
from elsewhere.

Still, as Eliot quickly realized, graduate schools perform
the same function as professional schools. Doctoral programs, and the
requirement that college teachers hold a PhD, professionalized the
professoriate. The standards for scholarship, like the standards for law and
medicine, became systematized: everyone had to clear the same hurdles and to
demonstrate competence in a scholarly specialty. People who could not clear the
hurdles, or who had never joined the race, were pushed to the margins of their
fields. The late-nineteenth-century university was really (to adopt a mid-twentieth-century
term) a multiversity; it had far less coherence than the antebellum college,
since it was essentially a conglomeration of non-overlapping specialties.

But Eliot’s reform also saved the liberal arts college. In
1870, one out of every sixty men between eighteen and twenty-one years old was
a college student; by 1900, one out of every twenty-five was in college. Eliot
understood that in an expanding nation, social and economic power would pass to
people who, regardless of birth and inheritance, possessed specialized
expertise. If a liberal education remained an optional luxury for these people,
then the college would wither away.

By making college the gateway to the professions, Eliot
linked the college to the rising fortunes of this new professional class. But
he also enabled college to preserve its anti-utilitarian ethos in an
increasingly secular and utilitarian age. For Eliot insisted on keeping liberal
education separate from professional and vocational education. He thought that
utility should be stressed everywhere in the professional schools but nowhere
in the college. The collegiate ideal, he explained in his Atlantic Monthly
article, is “the enthusiastic study of subjects for the love of them without
any ulterior objects.” College is about knowledge for its own sake—hence the
free elective system, which let students roam across the curriculum without
being shackled to the requirements of a major.

Effectively, Eliot struck a bargain: professional schools
would require a bachelor’s degree for admission. In return, colleges would not
provide pre-professional instruction. The college curriculum would be
non-vocational. And this is the system we have inherited: liberalization first,
then professionalization. The two types of education are kept separate. We can
call this dispensation Eliot’s bargain. It has proved remarkably durable.

Where do
master’s programs fit into this system? The answer seems to be that for most of
the history of American higher education, nobody really gave that question much
thought. The master’s degree evolved more or less under the academic radar, and
this explains a lot of its characteristics.

There is a prehistory of the modern master’s degree—Harvard
awarded master’s degrees in the seventeenth century—but that need not concern
us. The modern master’s degree emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth
century as a credential for teachers. In the beginning, when there were far
fewer doctorates, the master’s degree could qualify the recipient for a
university teaching appointment. By the 1920s, though, the master’s degree was
earned either as a credential for secondary school teaching, or as a way-­station,
or consolation prize, in PhD programs. And around that time, in the 1920s, new
master’s programs started to appear in fields unrelated to the liberal arts and
sciences: agriculture, art, business, city planning, engineering, forestry,
music, pharmacy, public health, and social work.

Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century,
enrollment in master’s programs tracked enrollment in higher education as a
whole. That is, the number of master’s degrees awarded increased at the same
rate as the numbers of baccalaureates and doctorates. This changed after 1945.
Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the number of master’s degrees awarded
tripled; the number of institutions offering master’s degrees doubled. Still,
the numbers are relatively small. The big jump came after 1970, and this is
when the current landscape started to emerge.

Three things happened after 1970. First, there was a rapid
increase in the number of master’s degrees. Between 1970 and 1990, there was a
48 percent rise in the number of degrees awarded annually. More than half the
master’s degrees ever awarded in the entire history of American higher
education up to 1990 were awarded in that twenty-year period. Keep in mind that
this was a period, after 1970, when undergraduate enrollment, after doubling in
the 1960s, was relatively flat.

Second, after 1970, new master’s programs were created in many
fields. These include applied anthropology, applied history, applied
philosophy, environmental studies, urban problems, health care for the aged,
genetic counseling, aviary medicine, international marketing, dental hygiene,
physical therapy, building construction, and advertising management. It was in
this period, between 1970 and 1990, that the master’s degree became
overwhelmingly a terminal professional degree, with business and education the
leading fields. By 1989, half of all master’s degrees were in those two fields.
Only 16 percent were in the liberal arts and sciences.

Finally, this was a period of curricular and pedagogical
innovation within master’s programs. Programs became less research-centered, a
shift manifested by the elimination in many programs of a thesis requirement.
Technologies were developed to enable distance learning. And programs became
more interdisciplinary, for the fields in terminal master’s programs tend not
to map on to traditional academic disciplines. They tend to be interdisciplinary
almost by definition.

There are a number of explanations for this expansion. A
common one is the transformation of the American economy into an information
and knowledge-based economy, a development that raised the demand for
better-educated workers. Another is the growing need of universities for
researchers and for teaching assistants. Master’s students, like PhD students,
provide this labor cheaply. And advanced degree programs are a reflection
partly of institutions’ desire to enhance their profiles by adding
graduate programs and partly of professions’ desire to enhance their profiles
by requiring a post-baccalaureate degree for entrance. The bulk of the
expansion in American higher education between 1945 and 1970 had been in the
public sector. Adding master’s programs gave state colleges a bigger profile
within the system as a whole. It not only increased enrollment figures, it
produced alumni with professional careers. In institutions without doctoral
programs, master’s programs might also constitute an asset in faculty
recruitment.

Concern about the master’s degree has been expressed in
official academic circles as far back as 1909. For much of the twentieth
century, the dominant complaints had to do, first, with the lack of consistency
among master’s programs, and, second, with the belief that master’s programs
are less rigorous than doctoral programs, even that the teaching in these
programs is often effectively at an undergraduate level.

On the first point, there is an unusual degree of
differentiation among master’s programs in terms of requirements for the
degree. Virtually every doctoral program requires a dissertation, some in the
form of monographs and others in the form of scholarly articles. Some master’s
programs require a thesis, but most do not, and the nature of requirements
differs widely. This inconsistency has troubled university administrators. And
the fact that the typical master’s student is different from the typical
doctoral student, tending to be older and in many cases part-time, has
contributed to the impression that master’s programs are not academically
rigorous.

How valid are these concerns? In the 1980s, the Council of
Graduate Schools sponsored a study of master’s programs. The study was run from
the Center for Educational Research at the University of Wisconsin, and it
involved surveys of hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators. The
report was published as a book by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1993. I
think it is fair to say that the three authors of the report were surprised by
the results of their survey.

In recording the perspectives of those
directly involved in master’s education—including students, alumni, and
employers as well as faculty and administrators—we came to understand that the
experiences these individuals had with master’s education were, for the most
part, very positive and inconsistent with the largely negative views of
master’s education portrayed in the literature. Despite being relegated by some
of the educators we interviewed to second-class status, we conclude that
master’s education in the United States has been a silent success—for degree
holders, for employers, for society in general....

Throughout the study, we were often
impressed—sometimes even astonished—by the extent to which students, program
alumni, and faculty valued their master’s experiences....

Equally important, we learned that there
are important social benefits associated with master’s education—benefits that
have been largely invisible in the literature and to many people in higher
education....

Many students and alumni told us that their
master’s education greatly enhanced their knowledge and understanding,
sharpened their ability to connect theory and professional practice, developed
a big-picture perspective, refined their analytic ability, made them more
critical questioners of knowledge, and honed their communication and
professional practice skills.1

You don’t see prose like that very often in the academic
literature on higher education.

Since 1990, the number of master’s degrees has continued to
increase at a rate that outpaces both bachelor’s degrees and first professional
degrees, such as JDs. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of master’s degrees
increased by 39 percent. In the next seven years, between 2001 and 2008, it
increased by another 33 percent. In that latter period, the number of
bachelor’s degrees increased by only 25 percent; the number of first
professional degrees by only 14 percent. There was a striking rise in the
number of PhDs, though, which has now turned into a professional disaster. The
increase in PhDs between 2000 and 2008 was 42 percent. On the other hand, in
2007–2008, there were almost ten times as many master’s degrees as PhDs
awarded, and more than six times as many master’s degrees as first professional
degrees. There were almost as many master’s degrees awarded in 2007–2008 as
there were associate’s degrees. Master’s programs constitute a big chunk of the
higher education system.

As this history suggests, master’s programs have a number of
characteristics that are not only different from the characteristics of
bachelor’s and doctoral programs, but that can seem anomalous and even
inappropriate and sub-academic. We’ve noted that master’s students are
demographically nontraditional. They tend to be older. Their graduate education
is often not full-time; it is not the immersion experience that most PhD
programs are. There is more use of distance learning technology and less
emphasis on academic research. And, of course, there is a much tighter fit
between educational programs and career opportunities. The ethic of
disinterestedness that is the core feature of undergraduate and graduate
education in the liberal arts and sciences in America is less prominent in
master’s programs. There are, of course, well-established and popular master’s
programs in the liberal arts and sciences, notably Masters of Arts in Liberal
Studies. But the growth and proliferation of master’s programs was mainly a
response to the needs of professions and employers, in business and in
government.

It is important to see, I think, that master’s programs would
not work unless they maintained these characteristics. The non-traditional
nature of the programs gives them something that undergraduate and doctoral
programs notoriously lack: nimbleness. This is a stratum of the educational
system that can respond quickly to student and market demand. The return on
investment is readily calculated in a way that it is manifestly not for liberal
arts education. Master’s programs run against the institutional grain of
mainstream academia. They grew up, so to speak, between the cracks of the
divide between undergraduate and graduate education that we inherited from the
nineteenth century, and they developed more or less autonomously, a derivative
of neither. The report of the Council of Graduate Schools study was called A
Silent Success. That is why the master’s program is the celery in the
traditional academic’s tuna fish salad.

Was
Eliot’s bargain a devil’s bargain? Eliot’s reform left a question mark in the
undergraduate experience. What, if nothing they were learning was intended to
have real-world utility, were undergraduates supposed to learn? The free
elective system that Eliot instituted at Harvard basically said, “It doesn’t
matter; you will learn what you really need to know in graduate school.” And
abuses of the free elective system, a problem that was much debated in higher
education circles in the late nineteenth century, led to a reaction against it
after the turn of the century and the institution of the undergraduate major.
But the idea that liberal education is by its nature divorced from professional
or vocational education persisted.

This separation is one of the chief characteristics of elite
institutions of higher learning. In a system that associates college with the
ideals of the love of learning and knowledge for its own sake, a curriculum
designed with real-world goals in mind seems utilitarian, instrumentalist,
vocational, presentist, anti-intellectual, and illiberal. Those are words that
trigger the academic auto-immune system.

Since these terms might characterize terminal master’s degree
programs, let us consider them for a moment. There is a little self-­deception
in complaints about vocationalism, since there is one vocation, after all, for
which a liberal education is not only useful but is deliberately designed: the
vocation of professor. The undergraduate major is essentially a preparation for
graduate work in the field, which leads to a professional position. The major
is set up in such a way that the students who receive the top marks are the
ones who show the greatest likelihood of going on to graduate school and
becoming professors themselves.

And it seems strange to accuse any educational program of
being instrumentalist. Knowledge just is instrumental: it puts us into a
different relationship with the world. And it is what is going on in the world
that makes colleges need continually to redefine what they do. Faculty in
liberal arts colleges always need to ask, “Are we preparing our students for
the world they are about to face?” If the faculty thinks that a curriculum in
which students spend most of four years being trained in an academic specialty
is not going to do it, then they usually try to implement a set of general
education requirements that ensure that all students will receive some
education that prepares them for life in the twenty-first century.

Liberal education today does face a danger, and it is the
same as the danger it faced in Eliot’s day: that it will be marginalized by the
proliferation, and the attraction, of non-liberal alternatives. There are data
to support this anxiety. Most of the roughly 2,500 four-year colleges in the United States award less than half of their degrees in the liberal arts. Even in the
leading research universities, only about half the bachelor’s degrees are
awarded in liberal arts fields. The biggest undergraduate major by far in the United States is business. Twenty-two percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that
field. Ten percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in education. Seven
percent are awarded in the health professions. Those are not liberal arts
fields. There are almost twice as many bachelor’s degrees conferred every year
in social work as there are in all foreign languages and literatures combined.
Only 4 percent of college graduates major in English. Just 2 percent major in
history. In fact, the proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded annually in
the liberal arts and sciences has been declining for a hundred years, apart
from a brief rise during the great expansion between 1955 and 1970. Except for
those fifteen exceptional years, the more American higher education has
expanded, the more the liberal arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the
whole.

The instinctive response of liberal educators is to pull up
the drawbridge, to preserve the college’s separateness at any price. But maybe
this is not the most intelligent strategy. What are the liberal arts and
sciences? They are simply fields in which knowledge is pursued
disinterestedly—that is, without regard to political, economic, or practical
benefit. Disinterestedness doesn’t mean that the professor is equally open to
any view. Professors are hired because they have views about their subjects
that exclude other views. Disinterestedness just means that whatever views a
professor holds, they have been arrived at unconstrained, or as unconstrained
as possible, by anything except the requirement of honesty.

But disinterestedness has its uses. What does liberal
education teach? I think basically three things. The first is methods of
inquiry. Undergraduate liberal education teaches students how to assemble,
interpret, and evaluate data. The methods range from statistics to
hermeneutics. Second, a lot of liberal education is historical. As we were
discussing earlier, liberal education gives students the back-story of present
arrangements, and in a way that allows them to appreciate the contingent nature
of those arrangements, and so see possibilities for change. It helps them see,
ideally, that the future is in their hands. And finally, a great deal of
liberal education is theoretical or philosophical. It helps students apprehend
the structure of assumptions that underwrite our practices.

Professional schools teach methods of inquiry (though one
wonders how much students in law school learn about hermeneutics). But they do
not teach historically or theoretically. The purpose of professional education—and
this includes doctoral education in the liberal arts and sciences—is to deliberalize
students. It is to get them to think within the channels of the profession, not
to achieve a critical distance on those channels. The aim of law school, as law
professors will all tell you, is to teach students how to think like lawyers.

But we don’t need to keep the peas of liberal education from
mixing with the mashed potatoes of professional training. Liberal education is
enormously useful in its anti-utilitarianism. Almost any liberal arts field can
be made non-liberal by turning it in the direction of some practical skill with
which it is already associated. English departments can become writing
programs, even publishing programs; pure mathematics can become applied
mathematics, even engineering; sociology shades into social work; biology
shades into medicine; political science and social theory lead to law and
political administration; and so on. But conversely, and more importantly, any
practical field can be made liberal simply by teaching it historically or
theoretically. Many economics departments refuse to offer courses in
accounting, despite student demand for them. It is felt that accounting is not
a liberal art. Maybe not, but one must always remember the immortal dictum:
Garbage is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.
Accounting is a trade, but the history of accounting is a subject of
disinterested inquiry—a liberal art. And the accountant who knows something
about the history of accounting will be a better accountant. That knowledge
pays off in the marketplace. Similarly, future lawyers benefit from learning
about the philosophical aspects of the law, just as literature majors learn
more about poetry by writing poems.

This gives a clue to the value-added potential of liberal
education. Historical and theoretical knowledge is knowledge that helps
students unearth the a prioris buried in present assumptions; it shows
students the man behind the curtain; it provides a glimpse of what is outside
the box. It encourages students to think for themselves. The goal of teaching
students to think for themselves is not an empty sense of self-satisfaction.
The goal is to enable students, after they leave college, to make a more
enlightened contribution to the common good.

Master’s degree programs that are situated within
institutions with a liberal arts faculty therefore ought to ensure that the
special perspectives that liberal education provides be part of their
curricula. I don’t think of these perspectives as humanizing the material. I
think of them as enhancing the value of what is learned, of giving students a
perspective that mere professional training does not normally provide. I think
it makes us better professionals

And ideally, undergraduate education in liberal arts colleges
can benefit from some explicit attention to practical and real-world issues, as
well. The divorce between liberalism and professionalism as educational
missions rests on a superstition: that the practical is the enemy of the true.
This is nonsense. Disinterestedness is perfectly consistent with practical
learning, and practical learning is perfectly consistent with
disinterestedness. We will not get hives if we try to bring these missions of
higher education into closer alliance.

I want to raise one further issue. This is the issue of
academic freedom. The principle of academic freedom was established in the United States by the founding of the American Association of University Professors, by John
Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy, in 1915. The AAUP was a response to precisely those
presidential Titans who put the modern American research university on the
world map. It was designed to protect faculty from the power of people like
David Starr Jordan and Nicholas Murray Butler.

Academic freedom does not mean that everything professors say
is given equal standing. This is manifestly not the case. The academic
profession is all about separating the worthwhile from the worthless—that is
what we spend much of our time doing—and there are many legitimate ways to
reward the former and penalize the latter. The essence of the principle of
academic freedom is faculty self-governance. Academic freedom means that only
faculty get to determine what is worthless and what is not. Faculty set the
requirements for graduation. Faculty set the criteria for entrance into the
academic profession. Faculty decide on the curriculum. The academic mission of
the college or university is the faculty’s business.

It is crucial, therefore, that the faculty feels that it has
authority over any academic program that its institution offers. Nimbleness is
a problem for faculty governance. Faculties are not nimble. So governance can
be a problem when programs are designed to adjust swiftly to market forces, or
when they use part-time faculty or practitioner-professors, or when student or
employer demand influences requirements and curricula. Faculty may not always
be the most efficient governors of academic programs. But the first rule of academic
administration is that you have to play with the cards that are in the deck.
Universities are not corporations: their bottom line is the intellectual
integrity of their product. It is the business of the faculty to ensure it.
That is what we are here for.

Louis Menand is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University. His book The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
2001) won the Pulitzer Prize. This essay is based on his lecture to the
Valparaiso University Faculty Workshop on 20 August 2010.